


In Another Life

by on_my_toes



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Genre: BACK ON MY BULLSHIT, Fix-It of Sorts, the author is a messy bitch who lives for drama
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-25 03:53:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13825923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/on_my_toes/pseuds/on_my_toes
Summary: “They delayed the funeral, you know,” she says. “Given the circumstances. It’s Monday, if that’s what you were calling to ask.”The world goes very still.“The — the funeral,” Oliver echoes.—A misunderstanding leads Oliver to believe that Elio has died the summer of 1984. Oliver returns to Italy to pay his respects.





	1. Chapter 1

The day before his wedding, Oliver’s fiancée hands him a cup of coffee, and he takes a sip, and blinks. A tear falls into his cup. She looks up at him, alarmed, and he bleats out the words, “I can’t marry you. I’m so sorry. I just can’t.”

 

The next six hours are a war zone. Shelley’s father screaming at him. Oliver’s father screaming at him. Shelley sitting in the corner of the loveseat couch they just picked out together, looking shell shocked more than anything, but not quite surprised. Oliver packs up as much as he can and heads to a friend’s house upstate; on what would have been his wedding day, he gets uncharacteristically trashed by the afternoon, then passes out on his friend’s couch and has wild, almost nightmare-like dreams about Elio that he can’t remember when he wakes up.

 

He takes the week he would have spent on his honeymoon to get his life in order: find a new apartment in the city, move the rest of his stuff out of the place he shared with Shelley, quietly let his close friends and immediate colleagues know that despite the last-minute cancellation, he and his family are okay.

 

He wakes up the Saturday after what would have been his wedding day with a startling kind of clarity: he has to call Elio. His mind latches onto this thought as if it had been the root of his intentions all along, but of course, it must have been. It always would be.

 

He goes to the post office to make the long distance call, his entire body thrumming with anticipation. He’s out of his mind, maybe — to think that Elio would even want to talk to him, let alone want anything else Oliver is about to ask. But he’s taken too many chances this week to back down from the one that matters most.

 

“Pronto.”

 

Oliver almost pulls the phone from his ear, wondering if he could possibly have dialed the wrong number. It’s a woman’s voice, older. Not Annella’s or Mafalda’s. One he doesn’t recognize.

 

“Hello?” he asks warily.

 

The woman’s English is heavily accented. A relative of Elio’s, maybe. “Oh … are you calling for Samuel?”

 

“No — Elio.”

 

Her voice takes on a different tone. “Ah,” she says lowly. “So terrible what happened.”

 

Oliver’s heart is sinking before he can even open his mouth.

 

“They delayed the funeral, you know,” she says. “Given the circumstances. It’s Monday, if that’s what you were calling to ask.”

 

The world goes very still.

 

“The — the funeral,” Oliver echoes.

 

She rattles off an address for a funeral home in Crema, with the grim, almost efficient tone of someone who’s had to do the same thing to a dozen other callers that week. Oliver’s tongue feels too thick for his mouth, the colors of the post office too bright, his hands disconnected from his body.

 

“What — what happened, exactly?”

 

It’s his voice asking, but it isn’t him. He has this insane compulsion to keep this woman on the phone, long enough that Elio will interrupt, come barreling in from some corner of the villa and somehow know who it is on the line; Elio, alive and well and cheeky as ever, clearing up what has to be some kind of mistake.

 

“You don’t know?”

 

“No, I wasn’t …”

 

“Car crash. This past Saturday. Drunk driver hit the boys from the side. Such an awful thing to happen here, of all places.”

 

“Awful thing,” says Oliver dumbly. He can’t think of words on his own. There is nothing left in his brain anymore, just a sharp, persistent whine that is slowly drowning out everything else. The walls of the post office, the plastic of the phone in his hands, the ground underneath his feet.

 

“I’m sorry, who is this?”

 

Oliver sets the phone back in its cradle. He walks out of the post office, into the too bright June sun, stumbles over to the curb, and throws up.

 

* * *

 

Oliver can’t let himself close his eyes. Not the night after the phone call. Not on either of the connecting flights to Italy. Not on the train, and certainly not in the taxi, even though the familiar scenery whirring by is almost more than he can bear. Every time he so much as blinks, he sees Elio — a bloody, lifeless Elio, extracted from a car by strangers, the light in his vibrant, cutting eyes extinguished in one fell swoop.

 

It’s his fault. He knows it in his heart. _Do you mind?_ he’d asked Elio that day on the phone, and Elio had sucked in a rattling breath. _You’re being silly_ , Elio had said to him, all postured and stiff — as if he really was Oliver in that moment, and not just in name. As if he were the older one, the wiser one, the one who had to reassure Oliver and not the other way around — _You’re being silly_.

 

But Oliver had heard past it, straight to the quiet splinter in Elio’s heart. He knew what he’d done. What he’d walked away from, and left in his wake. Until now, he had known there were consequences, but none so grim as this: in another life, Elio would have been at his side, spending the holiday with him. In another life, Elio would never have been in that car to begin with.

 

In another life, Oliver wasn’t a goddamn coward, and Elio didn’t pay the price.

 

It occurs to Oliver, halfway from the train station to the Perlman’s, that he won’t be welcome there. That he should take his hastily packed backpack to the room he’d booked in Crema and avoid them altogether. It won’t be lost on any of them that Elio died on what should have been Oliver’s wedding day.

 

His chest tightens. He wills himself not to break down in the cab, his fingers knotted into fists so tight that his nails are cutting blood into his palms. If he’d just called as soon as he’d broken it off — just run out of the apartment, to the nearest telephone, and told Elio right then and there —

 

“Can you turn around?” Oliver asks.

 

The driver takes him back to Crema, to the little building he’s renting a room in.

 

“Sir,” the driver prompts him, when he doesn’t immediately get out of the car.

 

And maybe he won’t. He shouldn’t be here. He can’t go to that funeral. He had chances, _so many chances_ , and he doesn’t deserve this last one. It would be an insult to Elio’s memory, to only show up now, when it’s far too late.

 

“Sir?”

 

“Sorry,” Oliver mutters. He’ll have to wait. Get another taxi or a bus to the train station, before this man assumes he’s crazy and drives him straight to a police station. He grabs his backpack and rifles in his back pocket for the now exorbitant cab fare, leaning through the window and muttering a quick “Grazi.”

 

“Oliver?”

 

He freezes. No, he can’t freeze. It isn’t his place, isn’t his right, to be the weak one right now — because he knows this voice.

 

He turns to see Annella’s eyes wide and glistening with tears. She is grey-faced, her expression stretched in a way he never could have imagined the summer prior, dressed in dark clothing. Samuel is beside her, looking as though he has aged ten years, his own eyes red-rimmed and his body slack and unlively, like someone else is inhabiting it.  

 

Their grief is somehow even more unbearable than his own.

 

“I …”

 

He starts to apologize, but before he can, Annella takes his face in both of her hands and says, with a heartbreaking kind of gratitude, “You’re _here_.”

 

Oliver tries to blink away his tears, but they come too quickly, too startlingly — he has never been one for crying and now that it keeps happening, he doesn’t know how to make it stop.

 

“I’m so sorry,” he manages. “I’m so sorry.”

 

Annella releases his face then, but only so she can pull him into an embrace, the kind so unreserved and so unapologetic that he feels like a thief for accepting it. He should say something comforting, something kind, but his own pain is too selfish and he suddenly can’t find the words.

 

Annella releases him, swiping at her eyes, and matters only get worse from there — Samuel embraces him, too.

 

 _No,_ he thinks to himself. _You should hate me. Hit me. Banish me from this place_. This place that is so already haunted by Elio’s ghost — the flimsy table they shared a drink at, the monument where they curbed their bikes, the bookstore that Elio slinked in and out of like a shop cat. An alleyway where they snuck a kiss, a corner where their hands grazed, a bus stop where Elio tripped and fell right into him.

 

It is too overwhelming; he keeps his eyes open, and he sees the past. He closes them and sees the ugly future. There is no escape from this, the walls pressing in from all sides, the weight of it more than a person can bear.

 

“Where are you staying?” asks Samuel. “Not here, surely?”

 

And just like that, Oliver’s intentions of sneaking back to the airport are dashed. “Yes, I …”

 

Annella sucks in a shuddering breath, shaking her head. “Absolutely not, please stay with us.”

 

“I — I couldn’t.”

 

“You must,” Samuel agrees.

 

“There is always a place for you in our home.”

 

It hurts him in a place he didn’t know he had left to be hurt, to hear her say that. The place in their home is a place that belongs to their son. Elio’s room and Elio’s books and Elio’s posters on the wall.

 

Annella is the one who spares him. “Settle in here,” she says, patting him on the cheek. “You join us when you’re ready.”

 

When they part ways he sees the Perlmans heading in the direction of the funeral home, a few streets away. Oliver has to force himself to breathe so he won’t throw up again — but the idea of it, Elio’s body in some casket, or reduced to ashes in some urn, is too much. Elio as an object, not as a person; Elio as a past-tense when he has been so aggressively _present_ even in the moments he couldn’t have been further from sight.

 

He makes it to the privacy of his room and even then isn’t prepared for the swell of it, for the intensity of the grief he hasn’t even let himself feel yet. The door clicks shut behind him and he’s on the floor, sitting up against it, his face in his hands, his knees pulled up to his chest. His body doesn’t know how to let the pain out or how to contain it — he has never felt weaker, never felt this rootless, this lost. He hates himself, then hates himself even further for having the comfort of being able to hate himself, when he should have nothing. Stripped. Bare. Finished.

 

Elio’s _gone_.

 

His body wracks with silent sobs, the final floodgate opened at last. He shoves his wrist into his mouth, trying to muffle the sound of it when it becomes unavoidable, but it’s pointless. He doesn’t care who hears — he’s beyond shame, beyond dignity, beyond any of the trappings of his former self. He cannot go forward or backward from here.

 

After some unknown period of time has passed, Oliver is wrung out like a sponge, nothing but an empty vessel. He stumbles into the bathroom, pours himself a glass of water, and regrets drinking it almost as soon as he does. His eyes immediately start to well up again. He stares at himself in the mirror, this ridiculous, puffy-eyed, wreck of a man, and doesn’t even know what he is looking at well enough to feel hatred for it anymore.

 

He knows, then, exactly where he must go. He will not see the Perlmans again. He will not go to that funeral. But he will say his goodbye to Elio, in the only place he properly can.

 

He washes his face a second time, runs his hands through his hair, and changes his outfit, making himself just presentable enough that nobody will balk at him downstairs when he asks to borrow a bike. What happens is worse — he sees the pity in their eyes. He forgets that it is ultimately a small town. They all know why he’s here.

 

“Take the car,” says the manager.

 

Oliver tries to plead otherwise, but the manager insists. He’s too tired to argue. He takes the keys and then takes the lonely, solitary road down to the berm.

 

He parks the car a ways off; he doesn’t want to be able to see it, doesn’t want it interrupting the sanctity of this place. He has this idea, maybe, that if he comes here, he’ll be able to close his eyes — even if it’s just for a second — and imagine things the way they once were. That maybe he will hear that low, self-conscious chuckle on the wind, or feel the graze of Elio’s shoulder on his arm, or remember that erratic, wild beat of Elio’s heart against his palm in the dark.

 

He doubts he’ll be afforded that kind of mercy. He doesn’t deserve it. But if nothing else, he can at least come here and attempt to say his goodbye.

 

He’s nearing the little hill that leads down to the water when he sees a bike propped up on a tree. His breath catches in his throat. It looks just like Elio’s — it may well _be_ Elio’s. It occurs to Oliver that he may have been the first person Elio showed this spot, but he has no way of knowing if he was the last. If someone else is here — someone else, with Elio’s bike, no less — that must mean that Oliver isn’t the only one here to say his goodbyes.

 

He doesn’t know why he continues down the path anyway. A morbid curiosity, maybe. In some ridiculous way, Oliver is jealous of whoever it is — this person who may have had Elio’s weeks, his months, when Oliver only had him for days. In a less ridiculous way, he is grateful for the existence of whoever it is — whether it’s a friend or something more. Elio had someone, at least. Someone he knew and trusted well enough to bring them here. And Oliver knows that that alone is enough for him to trust this person, too.

 

He is half-expecting to find Marzia, sitting in the dirt with her feet in the water. But the water’s edge is empty, as still and untainted as it was when Elio first brought him here, before he barreled into it.

 

What he sees instead is a liquor bottle, half-empty, the amber brown of it reflecting against the sunlight and the water. It’s on the ground, and there are pale, slim fingers wrapped around the neck of it. Oliver’s heart starts racing before his brain even wraps itself around what he’s seeing. He takes a step forward, and then another step, and sees the figure of a boy slumped and unconscious against a tree — a gangly, dark-haired boy, his face obscured by shadows but still unmistakable.  

 

Oliver is losing his mind.

 

For a moment he doesn’t move, taking in the scene — on the other side of the figure is a backpack. Elio’s backpack. He takes a step closer and sees, past the bruise that’s coloring half of his face, past the ugly stitches that mar one of his cheeks, past the glaring blue of the cast on his arm, is Elio himself.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This chapter contains implications of suicidal thoughts, and may be triggering to some readers.

Oliver is hallucinating. He has to be. The sleep deprivation, the grief, the insurmountable regret — it has turned him into a madman. His father would be smug, to see him now, so far fallen from the path they set out for him that he is thousands of miles away from where he should be and spiraling into lunacy.

 

But lunacy does nothing to account for the rise and fall of Elio’s chest, for the familiar, now overgrown curls obscuring his face, for the way Oliver’s heart cinches at the sight of him — that sharp pang followed by an ache, that place in his chest that has belonged to Elio since the day they first met and only grown since.

 

He approaches Elio’s figure in the grass, only realizing as he crouches down and nearly stumbles in the process that his entire body is shaking.

 

“Elio?”

 

The name comes out in a whisper. The ghost of Elio doesn’t stir.

 

And this supposed ghost of Elio looks far too roughed up to be anything but the real thing.

 

“Elio,” he says louder, with some urgency — the rational part of him cutting through the fog, and realizing that it’s nearing dusk and regardless of what is or isn’t happening here, this Elio or not-Elio is passed out in the grass with a liquor bottle in his hands and looking more unnaturally pale by the second.

 

Elio’s eyes flutter open and _there_ — there it is. His Elio. The eyes that know him, the eyes that haunt him, the eyes he never thought he would see again. The relief is so crushing that Oliver’s lungs feel too flimsy to breathe. He doesn’t even have the ability to question what or how it’s happening, just barely able to register that somehow, impossibly, it is.

 

Elio’s eyes are glassy, unfocused. “What …”  

 

His voice is so hoarse that Oliver almost doesn’t recognize it.

 

There are tears leaking out of Oliver’s eyes again, but an unfamiliar kind. Quiet, reverent, disbelieving tears.

 

“You’re here,” Oliver murmurs, at a loss for anything else. He reaches out to touch him, to skim the unbruised side of his face, but just then Elio flinches. His eyes latch on Oliver’s hand and follow a line up to Oliver’s face, and only then, when his eyes connect, does Oliver see how stricken they are — red-rimmed, aching, a depth of pain in them that Oliver can’t fathom.

 

“Am I dead?”

 

Oliver shakes his head. “You’re hurt,” he says, trying to make sense of it all — of Elio being here, of the fresh, red line that cuts from his forehead, interrupted by his eye, and skims down his cheek. Of the yellows and purples of the bruising, which Oliver can see extend beyond his face and into his shoulder, his collarbone, down to the cast around his arm.

 

Elio pinches his eyes shut. “You’re not here,” he says, his breath hitching. “You can’t be.”

 

“I thought …” _I thought you were dead_ , Oliver almost says, but even that is too painful to voice out loud. Like he’d be daring the universe to take this away from him, to make it the truth. “Elio, what happened?”

 

Elio shakes his head, his eyes still closed. His lips are moving, muttering something to himself that Oliver can’t discern, his hand unconsciously tightening around the neck of the liquor bottle.

 

“How much of this did you drink?” Oliver asks.

 

Elio doesn’t answer.

 

“Elio,” says Oliver, reaching out and tentatively putting a hand on his uninjured shoulder.

 

Elio flinches again, his eyes opening and taking Oliver in, blinking as if he is waiting for him to disappear.

 

“Elio, what’s going on?”

 

His words are slurred, his eyes still glassy, but Oliver finally makes out what it is Elio has been saying: “I should be dead,” he wheezes. “I should be dead, I should be dead, I should be …”

 

Oliver shushes him, the words slicing between his ribs, bleeding out of him even now. He looks Elio over, trying to wrap his brain around what’s happening, trying to stay calm even though it seems like whatever situation he just found himself in is escalating by the second.

 

“How did you even get out here like this?” he asks, more to himself than to Elio. And then, a question he already knows the answer to: “Does anyone know you’re here?”

 

Elio’s eyes are sliding shut again. Oliver looks at the bottle; it’s a good third of the way empty, and even then Elio’s always been a bit of a lightweight. He reaches over Elio, grabbing the backpack on the other side of him, looking to see if there’s water or anything else in there that might give him some kind of foothold on what the hell is happening right now. In the backpack are three things: a journal very much like the one Oliver once saw Elio writing in, the shirt that Oliver left for him last summer, and a bottle of pills.

 

Oliver holds it to the fading light of the sun — sleeping pills. Prescribed to someone Oliver doesn’t even recognize the name of.

 

“Elio,” Oliver asks, his voice tinny in his ears. “Did you take any of these?”

 

But Elio’s out again. Oliver’s chest seizes with a sudden panic, and he reaches out again, shaking Elio on the shoulder. Elio winces, sucking in a breath through his teeth.

 

“Did you _take_ any of these?” Oliver demands, louder this time, holding the bottle in front of Elio’s face.

 

Elio pulls in a wet breath. “No,” he says.

 

“Were you going to?”

 

Elio closes his eyes, two tears streaking down his cheeks. “I don’t know.”

 

“ _Elio_.”

 

“No,” he says. “I still have to go to the funeral. They delayed it … so I could go.”

 

“Whose funeral?” Oliver asks — anything to keep Elio talking to him, anything to keep his eyes open, because in the state he’s in Oliver doesn’t know whether or not to believe him about the pills.

 

Elio’s voice is wretched when he answers: “Matteo’s.”

 

It takes Oliver a moment to place the name, and then instantly there is a face to it: a cousin of Elio’s, the same age, who was only around for the first few days Oliver was in Italy before spending the rest of it studying architecture in Paris. His memories of Matteo himself are vague —  just a boy on a bike, teasing Elio about something at the dinner table and bickering over something at a tennis match — but the memories of the way Elio talked about him are still fresh in his mind. The closest thing to a brother Elio had. It took Oliver most of the summer to finally understood why Elio seemed so unanchored, so disconnected from his peers that summer — his safety blanket was hundreds of miles away, and for the first summer of his life, he was without a person he defined himself beside.

 

And then, suddenly, it all snaps into its grim, unrelenting place. The misunderstanding on the phone. The reason Elio is, impossibly, living and breathing and broken in the grass, and not about to be six feet underground.

 

“Oh, Elio,” Oliver says softly.

 

Elio bites down on his lower lip hard enough that Oliver’s afraid he might draw blood, still refusing to look at him.

 

“Come on,” he says, snaking an arm around Elio’s back. “We’ve got to get you home.”

 

Elio shakes his head. “You’re not here,” he says again.

 

“I am. I’m right here.” The pill bottle is still clenched in his fist; he tosses it, watching it float across the water, out of reach and out of sight. He turns back to Elio, back to his despondent, disbelieving eyes, and says, “I’m not going anywhere.”

 

Elio breathes out, low and strained. “You always do.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

Elio closes his eyes. “You’re there, and then I wake up.”

 

The words aren’t meant to hurt Oliver, but they feel more like a blow than a physical hit would have. It seems more selfish than ever, that he has hoped all this time that Elio might still want a future with him. He should have been hoping that Elio moved on, that Elio was afforded the peace that Oliver knew he never would be himself.

 

“Do you think you can stand?”

 

Elio doesn’t answer, drifting in and out again. Oliver grabs hold of his backpack and eases him up tentatively with the arm around his back. Elio’s body lurches for a moment like he might start to heave, but he doesn’t. Mindful of his broken arm, Oliver pulls Elio up to his feet, taking on most of his weight as Elio stumbles into him.

 

Somehow Oliver manages, half-carrying him, to direct him to the car. Elio takes one look at it and his whole body goes rigid.

 

“Elio?”

 

“No,” he says, trying to turn around. But Oliver’s grip on him is too strong, and he has all of the strength of a wet blanket. “I’m not … I can’t …”

 

“Hey. Hey,” says Oliver, turning Elio’s body so he’s forced to look at him. Elio’s eyes are swimming with panic, wild even in the setting sun. “It’s okay. It’s a short trip. You can lay down in the back and we’ll be home before you know it.”

 

Elio looks at him, and it’s the first time that Oliver feels like Elio actually sees him.

 

“You can trust me,” Oliver says.

 

Elio holds his gaze for a moment, and then gives the barest of nods. Oliver settles him into the backseat, and Elio slumps against it, his eyes sliding shut again.

 

“Could you — just stay awake?” Oliver asks, trying not to sound as nervous as he is. “Tell me about … about school. Where are you headed in the fall?”

 

Elio lets out a noise that, after a moment, Oliver distinguishes as a laugh. It’s dark and throaty, strangled halfway out of his mouth.

 

“Not going.”

 

Oliver keeps one eye on the road and one on the rearview mirror, making sure Eio’s still awake. “A gap year, then?”

 

“No,” Elio says into his hands.

 

“You must have something planned.”

 

A few moments pass before Elio speaks again.

 

“New York,” says Elio. An admission. Guilty and quiet.  “With Matteo. But …”

 

 _New York_. The words ring in Oliver's ears, but he compartmentalizes it, pushes it aside. His questions for Elio can come later; the weight of the grief in Elio's voice will not. 

 

“I’m so sorry, Elio.”

 

“It should have been me. I should be dead.”

 

“Please don’t say that.”

 

“Everyone thinks it.” Elio takes a shuddering breath, and then it spills out of him, out of some dark corner, as if it has been pressurizing there for days. “It’s not just me. Now my aunt’s alone, and Marzia was in love with him, and he was the better one, the kinder one, and I’m just — I shouldn’t have — it should have been me, it would have been easier for everyone.”

 

Oliver pulls the car to the side of the road, decelerating as gradually as he can. Elio’s eyes still widen in the rearview, cast out on the road in front of them, bracing himself. Oliver waits for a moment, trying to collect himself, trying to keep the ache of the last few days out of his voice.

 

“You are probably not going to forget most of this, because you are drunk out of your mind right now,” he say quietly. “But remember this: you can’t think like that. You just can’t. Because if you died …”

 

Oliver struggles to hold onto his composure. He knows all too well what would happen if Elio died; it’s been happening to him.

 

“It would kill me, Elio.” Either out of some misplaced shame for the way his actions in the past year have done nothing to reflect that truth, or an urgency to make Elio understand, he adds quickly, “And your parents. And all the people who love you.”

 

He doesn’t mean for the admission to slip through, but there it is anyway, said sideways instead of directly: love.

 

“If I lost you …”

 

 _When I lost you_ , Oliver almost tells him. But now is not the time.

 

“Shit,” Elio breathes.

 

“What?”

 

“You’re actually here.”

 

“I actually am.”

 

It might be a relief, in any other circumstance — a callback to the way they used to parrot each other, the same words with different intonations, like holding up a mirror to each other’s faces.

 

Elio lurches, and then reaches for the door, and only just manages to jimmy it open before throwing up on the side of the road. Oliver parks the car and gets out of the driver’s seat, walking over to Elio’s side, briefly examining the ground — no pills, not even any food, just the alcohol making his way back out of his system. Elio’s forehead is glistening with sweat, his entire body shaking. As wrenching as it is to watch, it’s probably for the best.

 

When he’s finished he puts a tentative hand on Elio’s knee. Elio draws it back, up to his chest, leaning back into the car. Oliver remains there for a moment, waiting to see if Elio will say something — if he’ll be upset, or angry, or any number of the things Oliver probably deserves right now. But his eyes are near vacant, staring into nothing at all.

 

It’s dark when they reach the villa. Mafalda spots them first, but Annella isn’t far behind.

 

“How …” Annella starts, her eyes wide as she takes Elio in.

 

Elio sways on his feet and Oliver reaches out to steady him. Elio shrugs him off, just as Annella steps forward, taking Elio’s face into her hands, her eyes filled with tears.

 

“Where were you?” she demands. “Elio, where _were_ you?”

 

Elio doesn’t answer. Just looks at her with cavernous eyes, before hanging his head low. She wraps her arms around him, and Elio falls into them, his face in her neck. She strokes his back and murmurs something to him in Italian, her voice soothing but still laced with panic, her hands shaking.

 

“How did he find you?” Annella asks Oliver. “Samuel’s still out looking — ”

 

“He didn’t. I found him,” Oliver says.

 

Annella’s eyes widen in surprise, and immediately brew with a new kind of worry. He sees her connecting the very bare pieces of information she has, sees the grim understanding start to settle.

 

“Okay. Okay,” she says, pressing a kiss into Elio’s hair. She pulls back from him, her hands on his shoulders, and says, “Go — go to the living room, go lay down on the couch.”

 

Mafalda guides Elio back into the house. Oliver watches him go, unsurprised but somehow still aching at the way that Elio doesn’t even look back, his feet trailing the path to the villa like they don’t belong to him.

 

Annella waits until the moment they are out of earshot.

 

“I’m sorry. He must have been — I don’t know what state you found him in, but you can’t take it personally.”

 

Oliver’s eyes must convey some confusion.

 

“He hasn’t spoken to anyone since it happened,” she says. “Not a word.”

 

Oliver doesn’t need to answer her; she already sees it in his face.

 

“He spoke to you,” she says.

 

Oliver’s hand skims the back of his neck. “He thought he was imagining me.”

 

“Where was he, Oliver? What was he doing?”

 

Oliver doesn’t want to lie. But he also knows Elio — knows that he found him in a moment of weakness. That Elio doesn’t truly want to die, even if the thought of it is like a poison running through his veins. That the reason Elio went out there alone is so he could process that alone, without the watching eyes of his parents and his relatives and god only knows how many people have descended on the villa since the accident. That if Oliver tells his mother the details of what happened on the berm, Elio will never forgive him.

 

“He was at his reading spot. He showed it to me last summer.” He hesitates, but only for a moment. “He’d been drinking.”

 

It’s not a lie, but it’s not the whole truth, either. Oliver decides in that moment that he’s just going to have to live with that — that he’s going to take it upon himself to make sure that what almost happened back there never comes close to happening again.

 

“What did he say to you?”

 

Oliver opens his mouth to answer, but falls short. He tries to think of something else to say, something to make up for it, but Annella stops him before he has to.

 

“Thank you,” she says, reaching out and squeezing him on the shoulder.

 

“I’d — I’d like to take you up on your offer. Stay here,” says Oliver. The unspoken words are much louder than the spoken ones: _To keep an eye on him_.

 

Some of the tension in Annella’s face softens. “Please do.”

 

His things are still back at the room he’s renting in Crema, along with the manager who is probably now regretting loaning Oliver the car. But right now those are the furthest things from Oliver’s mind.

 

He almost startles when Annella reaches out and touches him on the forearm, leaning close, lowering her voice.

 

“Did he …” She skims her lower lip with her tongue for a moment, and looks to the side, as though they might be overheard. “Did he tell you what he and Matteo were doing that night?”

 

“No,” says Oliver, suddenly chilled at the implication.

 

“Please,” she says, “if you don’t mind — tell me if he does.”

 

Oliver pauses for a moment, not sure where his allegiances should lie — with Elio, who is clearly not in his best mind; with his parents, and who knows who else, looking for closure; or with his own self. Because Oliver fears, with a cold and sudden dread, that he is the reason they were out that night. That there may never have been a moment Elio was more prone to recklessness than the one Oliver was supposed to leave him behind.

 

It’s self-important to think it, maybe. But the terror of it far outweighs that.

 

Eventually, Oliver nods. “Of course,” he says. “Of course I will.”


	3. Chapter 3

Oliver is expecting that Elio will be sleeping in his own room — the one that Oliver slept in last summer. But that room is almost exactly how Oliver left it — all of Elio’s things, his new books and his writing supplies and his Walkman and his clothes are all in the room on the side. As if he couldn’t sleep in the room after Oliver stained it, after the two of them left their mark.

 

So Oliver finds himself right back where he started — in a room that doesn’t belong to him, surrounded by pieces of Elio on all sides.

 

Samuel eventually makes it home, and he and Annella settle Elio into his room. Oliver waits a half an hour, until he’s sure Elio is asleep, and then opens the bathroom door connecting their rooms and leaves it ajar.   

 

Elio sleeps through the night — Oliver knows because he ends up falling asleep on the tile floor of the bathroom, so poised for the slightest of noises that he wakes up every time there is so much a creak in the hardwood floor downstairs. When Elio does wake up, it’s just past dawn — Oliver hears the gasp, hears the rustle of the sheets, and sees Elio sitting up in bed, looking stunned and almost a little bit disappointed to find himself there.

 

Oliver gets up to his feet slowly, trying not to scare Elio. It doesn’t work.

 

“Shit,” Elio mutters, a hand on his chest. He stares at Oliver with wide eyes, eyes that are much clearer than last night’s. A few moments pass, and Oliver watches as the pieces come back to him, or at the very least something of it does. “ _Shit_.”

 

“Sorry,” says Oliver, not even sure what part he is apologizing for.

 

Elio buries his face in his uninjured hand. Oliver takes a few cautious steps into the room, and then a few more — when Elio looks up at him warily and doesn’t say anything, Oliver figures it’s the closest thing to permission he’s going to get, and sits down on the edge of Elio’s bed.

 

“Why are you here?” Elio asks.

 

Oliver nods at him. “You.”

 

Elio shakes his head. His face is pale, his eyes heavy-lidded from the alcohol; with the bruising and the cut that traces down his cheek, he looks less like himself than he ever has. Oliver gets up wordlessly, finds a glass in the bathroom, fills it up with water, and brings it back to Elio. Elio stares at it for a moment, then at Oliver, before accepting it.

 

He takes a sip, his face contorting as it goes down. Oliver waits for a moment, wondering if Elio is going to be sick again. Instead he levels his gaze on Oliver and says, “I’m sorry you felt like you had to come.”

 

“Elio …”

 

“Let me guess,” says Elio dully, his eyes grazing Oliver’s left hand. “The honeymoon was nearby.”

 

Only then does Oliver realize he’s still wearing the ring; Shelley had insisted on him wearing it during the engagement. He’d laughed at the time, almost tickled by how jealous she was of other women staring at him. Laughed because he had never noticed them, and never would; laughed because it was easier than anything else he wanted to do when his thoughts inevitably strayed to Elio, time and time again.

 

Oliver wants to tell him this. Wants to tell him a lot of things. But the nightmare of finding Elio in the state he was in last night is too fresh in his mind.

 

“We need to talk about what happened at the berm,” he says.

 

Elio tucks his legs into his chest, making himself small and separate. “How did you even know I was there?”

 

“I didn’t,” Oliver admits. He waits for a beat to say, “But I think I was supposed to find you there. Before you did something you would regret.”

 

Elio lets out an defensive huff. “I wasn’t …” He blinks, his eyes filling with tears; he tries to scowl, to will them away, and turns his head away from Oliver. “I wasn’t — it wasn’t whatever you thought.”

 

“It was,” says Oliver. “You scared me. You’re scaring me.”

 

“What do you care?” Elio asks. The words aren’t accusatory, but genuinely curious. “You — you haven’t spoken to me in months. I — honestly, I didn’t even think you remembered I existed.”

 

Oliver’s voice is low, almost dangerous. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

 

Elio’s eyes flash up at him, angry, defensive — it’s almost a relief, to see something in Elio he recognizes. Something real. Something alive.

 

“Ridiculous? You’re the one who …”

 

And then something settles in Elio’s face, something that cracks open and withdraws in the same second. A realization of some sort, that stills him so completely that for a moment he doesn’t even seem to breathe.

 

“You think this had something to do with you,” says Elio to his knees.

 

Oliver opens his mouth, which has suddenly become intolerably dry.

 

Elio’s expression darkens. “It didn’t. It didn’t have a thing to do with you, or your wedding, or your perfect bride or your perfect life.”

 

The timing isn’t right, but Oliver has to tell him — has to tell him the wedding was called off, and why. Has to tell him about the phone call he made to the villa, the misunderstanding, the turbulence of the last few days. Has to tell him so he understands that there hasn’t been, for a single moment, a part of Oliver that ever forgot — not for a day, an hour, a moment in time. Elio’s touches are still ghosting his skin, like some invisible tattoo; he is still marked by him, owned by him, utterly and irrevocably bound.

 

“So you can — you can go back to her now. You’re in the clear. Absolved of whatever … _guilt_ you had. I didn’t go out and — and do something stupid because you were getting _married_.” A bitter pause, and then: “At the very least, I didn’t that night.”

 

Oliver suppresses a shudder, not even wanting to know what he means by that.

 

“It had nothing to do with you. Okay? So you can just … go _home_ ,” Elio says, his voice breaking on the last word, his eyes filling with tears.

 

Oliver is almost scared to reach out when he does, worried that Elio will freeze, or push him away, but what happens instead startles them both. Elio falls into his arms with a hiccuping sob, burying his face into Oliver’s shoulder — and just like that, he has that same softness to him that he did in the previous summer, that infallible trust in Oliver that both gratified and terrified him at the same time.

 

After a few moments, as Elio’s breath continues to hitch, Oliver strokes his back, careful not to press too hard in light of the bruising. Elio presses further into him, like he’s some kind of lifeline.

 

“You know that’s not why I’m here,” says Oliver softly, into Elio’s ear.

 

Elio doesn’t answer.

 

“I’ll always remember,” Oliver breathes. “Every moment. Every part.”

 

Elio pulls back from him then, blinking at him with a fresh kind of misery. He swipes at his tears with the palm of his good hand. Oliver can see some part of him retreating, something dimming in his eyes.

 

“What?” Oliver asks.

 

Elio presses his lips together. “Marzia,” he murmurs.

 

Oliver remembers Elio’s rambling the night before —  _Marzia was in love with him_. The guilt reflected in Elio’s eyes is even more fresh in the light of day.

 

“This isn’t your fault.”

 

Elio shakes his head. “My — my backpack,” he says suddenly.

 

Oliver left it in the front seat of the car. He’s about to tell Elio, but Elio speaks first, too frantically, too fast.

 

“Is it still at the berm?”

 

“Must be,” Oliver says, only because he is testing a theory.

 

“I have to get it.”

 

“Whoa,” says Oliver, putting a hand on Elio’s shoulder. “You’re not going anywhere in this state.”

 

“I have to — I have things in there I need.”

 

Oliver doesn’t know if Elio’s concern is for the shirt or for the diary, but he has an uneasy sense that it’s for the latter. And so Oliver lies.

 

“I’ll get it for you. When I return the car to Crema.”

 

Elio opens his mouth to protest, then claps it shut just as fast. That’s all the confirmation Oliver needs: there is something in that diary he doesn’t want anyone to see. And Oliver strongly suspects it has something to do with whatever it was he and Matteo were doing the night of the accident.

 

“You should talk to your mother,” says Oliver.

 

“She wants to know what we were doing that night. I’m sure she asked you.”

 

“She did.”

 

Elio’s eyes are stubborn. Defiant. “I can’t tell her. I can’t tell anyone.”

 

“Why?” Oliver presses. “Elio, the accident — it was a drunk driver. It wasn’t your fault.”

 

A shadow crosses Elio’s face, and then there are footsteps outside the door. Mafalda’s, Oliver already knows; somehow even after all this time, the gentle rhythms of this place are so familiar to him that it feels like he never left it. Like he returned to New York only waiting to come home to this place.

 

There’s a knock at the door. Oliver quietly rises from Elio’s bed, back through the bathroom, into the room he was supposed to be sleeping in with its untouched sheets. He hears Mafalda saying something to Elio, and seizes the opportunity to go downstairs, out to the car he so hastily parked the night before, to the backpack he left in the front seat.

 

He glances back up at the house before opening the journal, fanning the pages until he finds the most recent entry. The same words over and over again: _he should have told me the truth. he should have told me the truth. he should have told me the truth._ The writing more manic as it goes on, digging into the page, even tearing it in a few places.

 

Oliver’s blood runs cold. He flips back to the entry before that; this one is much more linear, much calmer. Almost grim in its resolve. It’s dated last Saturday — the day that would have been Oliver’s wedding. The day of the accident.

 

_We can’t go to New York with this hanging over Matteo’s head. I know he said not to interfere, but I can fix this. Everything will be okay, and he won’t have to worry anymore._

 

Oliver hears something rustle in the yard and slams the journal closed — just Anchise, coming in from the garden. Oliver waves at him. Starts the car and drives away, before anyone else can get close enough to see his face, before anyone can see the unease in it. He returns to the berm to collect Elio’s bike, then drops the car back off with the building manager in Crema.

 

It’s still early morning; the funeral isn’t until late afternoon. Oliver looks around the sleepy summer haze, at the shopkeepers just starting to open their doors and the sun just starting to stream into narrow alleyways, and sits down on a bench, opening Elio’s journal again despite the rush of guilt in his veins, beating in his heart like a boulder.

 

The entries before the cryptic one about Matteo leave no clues, though. In fact, the more Oliver reads, the more sick he feels.

 

_I don’t want to let Matteo down. He’s so excited about New York. But the closer we get to graduation, the more I dread the idea of it. I’ll probably never run into Oliver, but even the idea of it terrifies me. I think he would be upset to see me there. Worried, maybe, that I want something from him._

 

_The problem is, I still do._

 

He turns back a few pages.

 

_Maybe I’ll never stop wondering what he thinks about things. I keep assigning him all these imaginary opinions about things that I do, or pieces I play, or places I go. Sometimes when I’m about to do something especially stupid it’s like I can hear him in the back of my mind, disapproving. It’s maddening. It’s been almost a year now. He shouldn’t be allowed to take up that much space, but I don’t even remember what used to be there before him, anyway._

 

Oliver’s breath has stalled in his throat. He turns back another few pages, past Elio’s complaints about finals, past his musings about becoming an unexpected third wheel to Marzia and Matteo, past his frustration about an original piece he was working on. There, in April, is another entry that threatens to gut him.

 

_Can’t sleep. Again. I wonder what he’s doing. Stupid of me, probably. I hate myself. I wish I could hate him instead._

 

_Sometimes I wish I’d never met him. It never lasts long. Our literature teacher said once it is better to know the truth than to live in the dark; I didn’t know what she meant then, but now it feels like the only thing I know._

 

“Where did you get that bike?”

 

Oliver blinks, looking up from his perch on the bench. The sun is higher in the sky than he thought it would be. There is a man starting at him from the open window of an idling car.

 

“I … it’s a friend’s,” says Oliver, in his broken Italian.  

 

The man narrows his eyes at Oliver, and then at the bike. He sees him focus on one of the handlebars, the one that has a friendship bracelet dangling from it, a faded distinctive red and green pattern woven into it.

 

“What friend’s?”

 

Oliver goes very still, sizing the man up — his height, his muscle, the strange array of tattoos that weave up his arms.

 

“Why?” he asks.

 

The man looks him up and down, too. Evidently decides that whatever it is he wants from Oliver, it isn’t worth the fight.

 

“Tell him he can’t hide forever.”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

The man drives off without saying anything more, leaving Oliver with a churning in his gut, clutching to Elio’s journal with another fresh wave of unease. He shoves Elio’s journal back into the backpack and reaches for the bike to head back toward the villa, a thousand new questions rattling in his head, a thousand answers he’s almost too scared to have.


End file.
